News

22 May 2009

 

Pause in 2G spending leads to record GSM network revenue drop in Q1/2009

Despite a record number of 3G base-station shipments, the worldwide mobile infrastructure market revenue contracted 9% year-on-year in first-quarter 2009, according to market research firm Dell’Oro Group’s ‘Mobility Infrastructure Quarterly Report’. However, the GSM market experienced its largest year-on-year decline as Chinese mobile operators focused on 3G network deployments.

“The three Chinese mobile operators plan to spend over $20bn this year on rolling out the initial phases of their 3G deployments,” says senior analyst Scott Siegler. “China Unicom’s WCDMA deployment is shaping up to be the single largest 3G deployment in history and was the primary contributor to the most ever – 100,000 – Node B shipments in the quarter,” he elaborates. “With the CDMA market declining elsewhere around the world, China Telecom’s spending resulted in the most CDMA base-station shipments in over four years,” he adds. “As the two GSM operators - China Mobile and China Telecom - focused their spending on the rapid deployment of their 3G networks, spending on their GSM networks significantly declined. We expect this spending to accelerate in the second half of the year,” Siegler forecasts.

During first-quarter 2009, Huawei and ZTE experienced the greatest rate of growth, almost doubling their combined share of the total infrastructure market to over 20% compared to the same quarter last year, adds Dell’Oro.

See related items:

Base-station semiconductor market to drop 12.3% per year to 2012

LTE base-station infrastructure market to grow to $8.6bn by 2013

Search: 3G base-station Mobile infrastructure market WCDMA CDMA ZTE Huawei

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